Introductions

Greetings and welcome to the introductory post of Allpoint’s blog. I am Dr. Aaron Morris, Allpoint founder and LiDAR enthusiast. The Allpoint team and I have a unique background when it comes to the LiDAR industry and we have debated for some time about the best way to share our perspective with fellow LiDAR supporters. After comparing communication options, we agreed that a blog would be the ideal approach.

Other forms of communication just seemed a little too impractical and weather dependent.

What is unique about our backgrounds? Allpoint’s technical origins come from the world of mobile robotics, which means we dedicated a portion of our careers building, programming and commercializing autonomous robots to operate in the same places that we (humans) work. As it turns out, laser scanning plays a major part enabling modern robots to function in challenging environments without human operators to guide them.

Admittedly, some environments were more challenging than others.

After years of working with robots (as told here), we amassed massive amounts of scan data. Most of that data resided on hard drives, which at best served as paper weights. At some point, we realized that processed data was more valuable than the physical mass of hard drives and have since been in the business of information extraction.

Our goal with this blog is to share insights, discuss issues and tell you about events in the industry that will drive how LiDAR impacts our world. Occasionally we may even relay a story if it is particularly relevant to current affairs. For the most part, however, we believe LiDAR mapping and survey will serve a significant role in our future and we hope our blog will facilitate conversation and idea creation.

If you would like to join in the conversation, please leave a comment. We look forward to hearing from you.

After all, robots can do many things, but conversation isn’t one of them.